The Big Read: A song for whales

The whales have come back. They probably came back some while ago, but I only managed to drive down this week for the first time to see them.

There was a mother and two calves just behind the breakers, in the long dark swell where the water comes rolling up from the high latitudes. They were so close you could wade in to your waist and stand on tiptoes and still see them breaking the bright surface, their backs all black and grey and snowy with white callosities.

Every time the whales come back I marvel again. It seems incredible that they can have been to the frozen south, as far by sea as you can get while travelling in a straight line, rolling and spouting in distant, alien beauty. I picture them down there in a kind of cetacean jamboree, a broken sea of whale, a vast field of black backs between the floes and ice plains, blowing and dipping as their babies grow big beside them.

And here they are, back again, swimming long weeks north along invisible lines, back to this spot where they were born or where they mated or gave birth, here in this bay, beneath these cliffs. They couldn't astonish me more if they rollerskated down from outer space.

I accept that not everyone is as excited as me by this. I walked up the path from the beach and at the top of the cliff a rented car pulled up. There were several people inside from another country that I shan't name lest I inadvertently perpetuate some cultural stereotype or other. One of them rolled down a window.

"Have you seen any whales?" called the woman in the passenger seat.

"As a matter of fact I have," I said, a little too eager and Basil Fawltyish, pleased to be of service. I pointed to the sea. They swivelled their heads to look.

"You see the patch of white?" I said. "There, just past the rocks? That - right there . " I paused, like a showman building to the big finale. "That's a whale!"

They stared at the patch of white. It was maybe 200m away. I expected them to gasp.

"They go down and come up," I explained. "Sometimes they stick their tails out."

They looked at the sea like diners who have found an ear bud at the bottom of their soup bowl.

"You'll see it better if you get out of the car," I said.

"Have you seen any closer ones?" said the woman.

Madam, I wanted to say, if it was any closer it would need flip-flops.

"No," I said. "That's the closest."

"Okay," she said. "Thanks," and rolled up the window.

I don't care. Whales blow my mind. In Moby Dick Herman Melville used the whale as a symbol of the unknowable - of every thought and sunken motivation of man and God and nature, of the pasteboard mask that hides the infinite, of the vast blankness upon which we project our meaning - but metaphors shmetaphors. In the waters of Alaska, living right now, this very day, there are bowhead whales that are 200 years old. Those whales were more than 30 years old when Moby Dick was written.

Whales aren't symbols of anything or metaphors for anything else. They are simply what they are: beautiful, astonishing works of nature, no more beautiful or astonishing than any other piece of nature, perhaps, but personally moving for me because they suggest a literal poetry of ice and resilience and size and the deep.

More than anything, I drove down to see them because I wanted to see some good news. Each year since whaling ended, there are more of them. Some are returning from a frozen exile to the ancestral grounds where their forebears came, called by the resumption of a migratory instinct that for decades was over-ridden by self-preservation; others exist simply because we stopped killing them. There are more whales now than there were 50 years ago. They went away, they nearly died, but they've recovered, and all we had to do was nothing. We simply stopped being that version of ourselves, and they came back. This is what the whales say to me: not everything gets worse; sometimes it gets better.

In a world of Middle Easts and Marikanas and Fergusons and the men who killed James Foley and the storm of inequality gathering around us all like a biblical deluge, it might seem petty and privileged to spend time thinking pretty thoughts about whales. They don't feed the poor, they don't stop anyone's suffering. They don't do anything and don't really mean anything and to care about them is the privilege of middle-class sentiment. To that I have no defence, but the whales are back, and that makes me happy.